Loni Stark is senior director of strategy & product marketing at Adobe. In her role, Loni leads business growth and go-to-market strategy and execution for Adobe’s digital experience management business. Adobe is a recognized leader in solutions for Digital Experience Platforms and Marketing Cloud Hubs by Forrester and Gartner respectively.

Under Loni’s guidance at Adobe, her team has achieved high double-digit revenue growth over the last 5 years after the $240M acquisition of Day Software and established the solution as a key pillar in Adobe’s $1B+ digital marketing business. The solution, Adobe Experience Manager, has helped hundreds of brands–including Hyatt, GM, and Travelocity–transform their online presence and is recognized as a leader by analysts including Gartner and Forrester.

She is also co-founder of Stark Insider, a leading media brand and “A West Coast Adventure” with over 750K readers a year, and 5 million video views across YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and Instagram. Over the past 10 years at Stark Insider, she has interviewed more than 200 creative thinkers and doers who are pushing the boundaries of film, music and technology. Loni is also a mentor at Alchemist Accelerator, named one of the top 5 Accelerators in the U.S. in 2015, where she advises founders of start-ups.

Loni frequently speaks at industry conferences and her articles on the impact of digital on customer experience and marketing have appeared in publications including TechCrunch, Entrepreneur and Content Marketing Institute.

Recognized as a Silicon Valley Business Journal Top 40 under 40Loni holds a Masters in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University and studied innovation leadership at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In her spare time, she likes to paint and sip Napa Cabs, preferably at the same time.

With over 18 years of experience, Loni is a leading expert on how organizations build relevant brands and drive sustained revenue through innovation. Loni is passionate about how technology impacts business and creativity.

Adobe

Loni moved to Silicon Valley from Toronto, Canada in 2000 for the opportunity to work as an engineer on Adobe’s first online collaboration service for creative professionals, after passing on ten job offers closer to home. She was attracted to Adobe because it merged creativity and technology. What other software company at the time had Venus de Milo on its box art?

When businesses started to move from paper to digital, she became one of the earliest product managers for Adobe’s entree into the enterprise market. Loni defined the first version of an electronic forms and document solution with strategic technology partners including IBM, EMC (Documentum) and Oracle (Siebel) and system integrators like Accenture and Deloitte. Loni then led a team to establish industry solutions and marketing across financial services, public sector, life sciences and manufacturing combining Adobe’s entire product portfolio with those through the $3.4B Macromedia acquisition. During the US healthcare reform in 2009, she defined the Adobe strategy to address the opportunity.

“Creativity is found in the questions we ask, not the answers we have.” – Loni Stark

As the digital transformation expanded into how businesses interact with customers, she worked on a core team with Geoffrey Moore (best-selling author, Managing Director at TCG Advisors and a venture partner at MDV) to define Adobe’s strategy and offering. Loni and her product marketing team then led the launch of Adobe’s first customer experience management platform.

In 2015, Loni was selected as one of 39 senior leaders to participate in the Leading@Adobe senior leaders program in partnership with Haas School of Business, University of Berkeley.

Before Adobe, Loni worked as a software engineer at Nortel Networks during the telecommunications boom. She still sometimes gets nostalgic about designing data structures, handling her own garbage collection and writing code to fit onto less memory than is now in an Apple iPhone.

Loni has interviewed creative thinkers and doers on Stark Insider such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mad Men actor Vincent Kartheiser (“Pete Campbell”), singer/songwriters Ben Rector and James Bay, actresses Nicole Kidman, Emma Stone and Amy Adams and James Franco, among others. She is always up to the challenge to try something new including doing flips on the set of Cavalia or attempting to audition for Cirque du Soleil.

Stark Insider provides an original, first-hand perspective on technology and culture that is fueled from the never-ending desire to explore and learn new things.

Education

Loni credits her early education to her parents who always had the basement brimming with art supplies and widgets that she could use to create and experiment. Admittedly, she did almost clog up the entire plumbing of her childhood home with plaster of paris when the mold she built had a leak. Thank goodness for the invention of p-traps.

She holds a Masters in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University, and studied innovation leadership at Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. Loni earned her Bachelors in Arts & Science, with a major in Computer Science and minor in Economics from McMaster University.